Those Who Save Us (17 page)

She sets her glass carefully on its napkin. She is getting a little drunk.

So she never admitted she was the one turning in the Jews, Roger says.

Not outright.

And you didn’t confront her with it.

Well, no. But. It was obvious she was talking about herself.

Yes, of course, says Roger. Mmmmm. Interesting.

He props an elbow on the bar and tugs his mustache, examining Trudy with the heavy-lidded, deceptively sleepy gaze that she knows masks his keenest curiosity.

What, Trudy says.

Nothing. It’s nothing.

What
it’s nothing.
It’s not nothing. Not when you’re giving me the Look. What is it?

I really don’t want to get into this, Trudy.

Into what? Come on, Roger. Out with it.

It’s just still amazing to me, that’s all.

What is?

The lengths you’ll go to to avoid therapy.

What? says Trudy. What are you talking about?

Roger gazes at the ceiling as if beseeching the skies above for patience.

It is beyond me, he says, why you would waste all this time and energy on this project of yours when you could just get counseling to deal with your issues in a normal way and move on.

I am doing, says Trudy, biting off each word, empirical research.

For whom? Tell me honestly. For the academic realm? Or for yourself ?

What difference does that make, Trudy snaps.

A smile spreads Roger’s mustache, and Trudy bristles. She knows exactly what he is thinking of: their single session of marriage counseling, after which Trudy had a fit of hysterical giggles in the car over the therapist’s earnest, sweating attempts to foster rapport—
Now, Roger, hold Trudy’s hands, that’s right, and look deep into her soul and tell her exactly how you feel about her
—and bulging froglike eyes. She refused to go back.

Counseling is not the answer to everything, Roger, she says now. Just because you and Kimberly go to, to encounter groups and retreats and sweat lodges to, to discover your inner animal spirit guides or God knows what—

Roger’s smile curls further.

Oh, Trudy, he says.

Don’t you take that pitying tone with me.

I don’t pity you, says Roger gently. I’m trying to help you. Don’t you see, Trudy? It’s all about your mother. I still don’t know what your particular beef with her is, but any Psych 101 student could tell you the underlying pathology: you’re just like her.

Trudy is so enraged that she can’t speak. She sputters incoherently for a minute, then finally manages to come out with, Oh yeah?

Absolutely.

Trudy slides off her stool. Well, that’s exactly what I’d expect from Psych 101, she says.

She reaches for her wine to polish it off in a show of bravado, but her hand is shaking so hard that she has to put the glass down. She decides not to give Roger the satisfaction of watching her try to button her coat.

Besides, she says, snatching her purse from the floor, what would you know about it? You’ve hardly even met my mother.

Of course not, says Roger smoothly. You wouldn’t let me. But from the rare occasions I did meet her, I’d say the similarity is obvious. More than obvious. Striking.

Is that so.

Yes, it’s so.

Well, it is not. I am not remotely like my mother.

Now there’s an interesting Freudian slip, says Roger. She
is
remote. And so are you. You always have been. Remote. Formal. Cold. Compulsive about cleaning. All those good German traits. You know.

I do not know, says Trudy, storming toward the door to the street. I do not know anything of the kind. All I know is that you’re still a pompous ass. You haven’t changed a bit.

Nor have you, says Roger, following her. Sadly.

He opens the door for her with a sardonic little bow, denying Trudy the chance to slam it in his face.

Always a pleasure, he says.

Go to hell.

Trudy brushes past him and stalks down the sidewalk, cursing the ice for making her watch her step and foiling her grand exit.

And Roger ruins it further, for as Trudy reaches her car she hears him call, And hey, Trudy, about your German Project? I don’t know why you’re even bothering. Of course all those old Krauts are Nazis! What else did you expect?

21

BY THE TIME TRUDY GETS HOME, IT IS FULL DARK AND snowing a little—a few flurries spinning uncertainly in the motion-sensitive light over her garage—and the large round thermometer affixed to the neighbors’ deck shows the temperature to be fifteen below zero. But Trudy doesn’t notice the cold. She steams up her walk with her coat still unbuttoned, and as she shakes out her keys to unlock the door she tells the indifferent yard all the things she should have said to Roger back at Le P’tit.

Just like my mother, she mutters. Typically German. Krauts! What would
he
know about it? Big ox. Stupid Scandinavian. Big— dumb— woodenheaded— Viking!

She flings the door open and steps inside, pulling off her gloves, finger by finger, with small angry yanks.

No wonder I never remarried! she says.

Then she hits the light switch and stands looking around her kitchen, as she always does when returning home, to ensure that everything is in place. And it is. The room is exactly as Trudy left it—no surprise, since she is the last person, the only person, to have been here. The floor boasts the snail trails of a recent waxing. The counters gleam. The teakettle—which Trudy scours with a steel wool pad every Sunday—is so shiny that she can see her face in it, elongated and miniature, from across the room. Normally this would please Trudy, to find her home and the things in it in such perfect order.

So nice and clean.

So
nett und sauber.

Trudy frowns and folds her arms. Knocks the heel of her boot on the linoleum a couple of times.

Then, deliberately, she tosses her keys onto the counter instead of hanging them on the hook by the door.

She wriggles out of her coat and slings it on a chair. Her gloves follow, one landing on the table, the other on the floor. Stepping daintily over it, Trudy crosses to the stove, where she puts water on to boil. While she waits, she leans against the refrigerator, eyeing the muddy tracks her boots have left on the tiles, and when the kettle sings, she makes herself a messy cup of tea, flinging the used bag toward the sink without looking to see where it lands, carefully ignoring the sugar granules she scatters. She leaves the spoon on the stove top and the sugar jar next to it with its lid off, for the mice—were there any—to plunder.

She steps back, surveying the room over the rim of her mug.

There, she says.

Then she retreats to her study with her tea before she can give in and tidy everything up. From down the hall the disorder tugs at Trudy, the coat and gloves and canister and muddy floor reproaching her:
But what have we done to deserve this?
Trudy shuts her study door and turns to her stereo.

A Brahms symphony thunders forth when she presses the PLAY button. Grimacing, Trudy sets her mug on the desk and crouches to canvass her stack of CDs. Bach, Beethoven, more Brahms, Mahler, Wagner—God in heaven, has she nobody but German composers? Finally Trudy finds an Austrian buried among the rest, and a sprightly Mozart concerto replaces the symphony on the turntable. This accomplished, Trudy walks over to her couch and collapses on it, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes.

What did you expect?
It is, perhaps, a fair question Roger has asked. Trudy doesn’t know. She feels stupid for having not anticipated what Frau Kluge might say. Naive in her hope—unarticulated even to herself before the interview—that the woman would confirm that not all Germans are as bad as people think; they can’t all be Nazis at heart, can they? It is as though Trudy has reached under a rock and touched something covered with slime. And now she too is coated with it, always has been; it can’t be washed off; it comes from somewhere within.

Trudy tells herself not to be so childish. She lies back and gazes blearily through the semidark to the window and the house beyond. All along its gutters colored lights are strung, or rather tubing in which tiny bulbs light up in frenetic sequence and at insane speed, like running ants, before stopping to blink and blink in agitated rhythm. Trudy wishes she could lie to her neighbors, tell them that she is epileptic and their decorations are causing seizures and have to be taken down. Why must people make such a hoopla of Christmas? It is a wretched holiday, really, one that Trudy has always spent at the farmhouse, sitting straight an as exclamation point in her black clothes while Anna serves more goose and stuffing than the two women could ever hope to eat. And this year Trudy’s Christmas will consist of a visit to the New Heidelburg Good Samaritan Center, where she will spoon up Jello cubes in the face of her mother’s eternal silence.

Trudy closes her eyes. Maybe she should abandon her Project altogether. Why invite additional punishment when she already has Anna to deal with? Perhaps it is best not to stir up this particular nest of snakes. To leave well enough alone.

The past is dead. The past is dead, and better it remain so.

The lights pulse in frenzied patterns on Trudy’s lids. She slings an arm across her face. The concerto comes to an end, and in its absence the house is so quiet that Trudy can hear a clock ticking in another room, reminiscent of the water dripping in Frau Kluge’s sink.

After a time Trudy gets up, takes her mug from the desk, and returns wearily to the kitchen. She pours the cold tea down the drain. Washes the cup and spoon and sets them in the dish rack. Throws out the teabag and screws the lid tight on the sugar canister and puts it in the cupboard. Sponges the stove and countertops. Hangs her keys and coat and tucks the gloves in the pockets.

When everything is in place, Trudy turns off the lights and climbs the stairs to her bedroom, where she removes her boots and curls on her side, wedging her clasped hands between her thighs. Her last conscious thought, conjured by the pale parallelogram on the far wall, is that she has forgotten to draw the curtains. But at least the neighbors’ crazed lights can’t be seen from here.

Trudy drifts into an uneasy sleep. And dreams.

SHE IS IN HER LIVING ROOM, CROSS-LEGGED ON THE FLOOR, wrapping Christmas presents. This is a peculiar and pointless endeavor, for aside from Ruth and Anna, Trudy has nobody to bestow gifts upon. Yet she is surrounded by children’s toys: a hobbyhorse, a waist-high nutcracker, an army of tin soldiers; there is an endless amount, and if Trudy does not wrap them they will multiply further and take over her house. She sips from a snifter of schnapps and reaches for the next item, a rifle so realistic in appearance that Trudy is surprised it doesn’t leave oil on her hands.

She is struggling to disentangle a piece of tape that has stuck her thumb and forefinger together when she sits upright, suddenly alert. Something is wrong. Her Brahms, the Second Concerto, sounds scratchy, as though emanating from a record turntable instead of her CD player. In the corner is a Christmas tree draped with tinsel and garish bulbs from the forties. And beneath Trudy is not a careworn Oriental rug but her mother’s deep-pile carpet. Trudy sinks back on her heels and shakes her head over her stupidity: she is not in Minneapolis at all. She is in the farmhouse. But . . . if Jack is dead and Anna is at the Good Samaritan Center, who is in the kitchen? For Trudy hears somebody walking about in there, and the creak of the refrigerator door as it opens.

Brushing snippets of paper and curling ribbon from her knees, Trudy walks into the kitchen to investigate. And there, his back to her, she finds Santa Claus. He is hunched in front of the old Frigidaire, digging through its contents and tossing those he doesn’t like to the floor, wolfing down those he does with such gusto that his shoulders shake.

Trudy is indignant.

You aren’t supposed to be here, she says. Santa is supposed to come only at night, when people are sleeping, don’t you remember?

Santa turns. He is drinking milk straight from the bottle, a habit both Trudy and Anna deplore as unhygienic. His red sleeve, trimmed with jolly fur, blocks his face from view, but Trudy sees his Adam’s apple working beneath it.

When he has drained the milk, he throws the bottle across the room in the direction of the sink. It misses and shatters on Anna’s linoleum, spraying glass and droplets.

You get out, Trudy tells him, her voice shaking. Get out of my mother’s house.

Santa laughs heartily.

My dear child, he says, your mother won’t mind. Why, she’s the one who invited me.

Then, to the forlorn horns of the concerto’s second movement, Santa begins an incongruous burlesque. He slowly undoes the buttons of his jacket, and it pops open to reveal not the pillow or cotton stuffing one might expect, but food: a netted ham, a tin of sardines, several loaves of black bread. He sets these one by one with great ceremony on Anna’s Formica table. Then he unbuckles his belt and starts to unzip his trousers.

Stop that, Trudy cries.

But Santa ignores her. Humming the Brahms, which now plays at the wrong speed so that the strings drone and shriek, he pushes down his trousers and kicks them free of his feet. He has to do an awkward little dance to do this, since he hasn’t removed his shining black boots, but Trudy soon understands why: beneath the Santa suit, he is wearing the gray uniform of the
Schutzstaffeln,
the SS.

He swings a chair out from the table and sits, his face hidden now by the brim of his peaked cap. The light splinters off the double-eagle insignia.

He pats his knee.

Come, sit down, he says, and tell me: Have you been a good girl this year?

No, says Trudy. No, no, no—He cocks his head. Yes? he says, as if he hasn’t heard her. Good. Then I will show you a little something.

He rises from the chair and starts to undo the buttons of these trousers as well.

Stop it, Trudy shouts. I don’t want to see!

He parts the cloth and holds it open, standing at attention. He wears nothing underneath, and his stomach and pubic hair are smeared with dark blood.

You see, I am not Santa, he says. I am Saint Nikolaus, and I come whenever I please.